In the British mind, the iPhone is a more important invention than the automobile, calendar, or hot water, though not as important as its immediate forebears: the telephone, personal computer and the internet.
A Tesco Mobile survey of 4,000 consumers aged between 18 and 65 placed the iPhone eighth out of 100. As might be guessed …

Wait, what?

Agreed

Theres only two things in my tool box, duct tape and WD-40. If whatever is broken is sticking and it shouldn't, it gets the WD-40. Or, if it should be stuck to something, but isn't, it gets the duct tape.

This is the IMDB effect

Look at IMDB, almost all of the top 10 films are recent, like LOTR. Then if you look a little lower you find the genuine timeless classics. Ask this again in a few years and some other gadget will be in the top ten, and will still be less important than things that people take for granted (like vaccinations)

Wellies only 85?

This is just a refelection of the way we live..

.. and I notice that the word "clock" is nowhere on the list, or music, or mathematics, or alphabet, or navigation, or money, banking (bit contentious, that). Oh the list goes on; obviously they never played Civilisation.

Hmmm....

Pacifists?

Odd that there are no weapons on this list. Not the nicest things but certainly important. I'd say the Flint Axe was arguably more important than the wheel. The pike, long bow, gunpowder, canon, flint lock, rifled musket, maxim machine gun, tank and atomic bomb have all had some impact on history. Obviously not quite the global impact of hair straighteners (34) but still you'd think one of those might have sneaked in at the bottom of the list.

Maybe there is a bias to things they sell in Tesco? I guess a survey of Wal-Mart customers might have seen more recognition of the importance of armaments.

Penicillin

So, according to this survey...

The average Briton would rather children's, um, wastes dropped freely than be deprived of the opportunity to buy an iPhone and considers the WonderBra more important than fire - didn't even make the top 100.

OK, If you want to be pedantic

Yes this is a title

Depressing

Hmmm, for my top 10 I'm going to have to go old school

1)Language

2)Alphabet

3)Agriculture

4)Fire

5)Wheel

6)Transistor

7)Vaccination

8)Penicillin

9)The internet

10)The Steam Engine

IMO there is only one way to carry out these surveys. get a list of all the inventions then present the survey muppets with 10 at a time. Get them to order them from most important to least important and aggregate the results. I would also question wether an Iphone is an invention as it's more a good user interface than an invention.

@password

You wally...

The iTards have spoken.

I can only assume there was an iPhone app to vote for your favourite invention, as clearly any sane person (i.e. not an iTard) would have picked "Mobile Phone" or "Smartphone" rather than a brand of smartphone..

Sometimes it's embarrassing to be British, right now is one of those times.

Boils the the blood it does...

- Some rely on more fundamental inventions; eg Anything electronic -> The semi-conductor, or any moderm mode of transport -> ball bearings

- No weapons listed..though in the right hands, anything on this list could be, if I was being philosophical. Or creative.

- Some aren't even relevant...Space travel is an invention? Since when?

- Some are duplicates - Mascara and make-up are the same thing, surely?

But the killer of the lot is the British public, strolling about with their brains in neutral to come up with some of the entries...Post-it notes? Curtains? Did they interview my gran or something, and they merely picked out all the nouns in one of her typical 5 hour rambling monologues?

Oh dear

Marketing

The iphone's invention was far less important than its marketing. It is the marketing which has made the mobile web as popular as it is, not the capabilities of the phone, which were invented before the iphone.

Agree - Apple Marketing

Clearly the marketing and hence consumer perception/brand value is so strong that without too much thought, people asked this question quickly come up with the iPhone as their top answer. And of course it does help that the product itself lives up to the marketing

And these people are allowed to vote!?

Oh my... i'd love to see the car, combustion engine, beds, roofs, fridges, freezers, microwaves, curtains etc removed from the society of some of these people and see if they still prefer having their iPhone.